ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the oriental-observer letters of the character Mustapha Rub-a-Dub Keli Khan, in Salmagundi (1807–08), the product of Washington Irving’s collaboration with his brother William and friend James Kirke Paulding. It finds the text, and specifically the oriental-observer letters at its satirical heart, to be mocking the dramatic societal changes reflected by American oriental discourse during the early republic in its producing “citizen spectators” of a democratic spectacle. Especially the importance of a growingly central print and consumer culture occupies Irving’s and his collaborators’ attention. In searching for the meaning to the seemingly hollow show such influences have produced in America, they find themselves turning their gaze, ironically or not, to the figure of a visiting Easterner, whose reception by Americans reveals perhaps too much about the nation’s own fears and dreams. What the authors propose, the chapter finds, is a characterization of internal and seemingly dangerous elements of the nation, in particular women, as “oriental” commercial and consumerist influences requiring the maintaining of rational distance, and the demonstrations of sublime power, on the part of a developing masculinist and supervisory state.
